As a fundamental purpose of intranets, communication has a vital role to play in the ongoing development and success of a site. But understanding how an intranet can perform as a useful communication platform is often lacking.

This article will explore three types of communication that can be found or deployed on an intranet. There are many others too.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 753 days, 22 hours, 35 minutes ago

I have this friend who’s been looking for a Content Strategist for a web design project. He’s having trouble finding someone who has all the skills and experience that he wants them to have. This is bound to happen, because the field is new enough that there’s no standard set of skills and experience for people who practice content strategy. Plus, he was looking for some pretty specialized extras.

My advice to him was to look for someone with the core skills, and then prepare them to acquire the rest on the job. I’m pretty confident that a person with the following five qualities could pick up any content strategy task you might need them to do.

Source: scattergather.razorfish.com Posted by bee 761 days, 16 hours, 10 minutes ago

More and more customers are going straight to specific pages on your website, rather than the homepage.

The decline of the homepage In 2003, 39 percent of the page views for a large research website were for the homepage. By 2009, it was down to 19 percent. In one month in 2008, of the 70,000 page views a technology site received, 22,000 were for the homepage. For the same month in 2010, of the 120,000 page views the site received, only 2,500 were for the homepage.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by bee 764 days, 16 hours, 49 minutes ago

The first time I noticed the word "Content" had changed, I was being ushered into the inner sanctum of Zappos by a woman answering phones in an Elvis costume. Why is there a content department at Zappos? Don't they sell shoes and other nifty stuff? Well, it turns out, at Zappos the folks who make images, text, and product information for the Web site are working with Zappos "Content." Makes sense, in a Zappos kind of way, I thought at the time.

But in the eight months since that visit, the world has changed. All of us, it now appears, are in the Content business. Retail, E-commerce, Consumer Brands. And Media. It's all content now. And, if you accept that fact that your company is in the Content Business, then you're going to need a plan to turn your "build-it-and-forget-it" Web site into a thriving and organic content publishing offering.

Source: www.fastcompany.com Posted by bee 766 days, 16 hours, 37 minutes ago

In my post ‘How to get quality content’ I showed how much people value BT’s intranet and are confident about the integrity of the content they use.  BT’s intranet standards mean publishers must keep information up to date and clearly owned so users can rely on it.

In this post I’m going to cover BT’s intranet standard on naming of pages that helps users to find what they need more easily. Each page should have a title relevant to the content to help users when they bookmark your site or scan search res...

Source: markmorrell.wordpress.com Posted by bee 769 days, 2 hours, 4 minutes ago

According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation’s intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application.

It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.

Source: www.ariadne.ac.uk Posted by support 771 days, 14 hours, 20 minutes ago